What went wrong–and right–with 10 famous trials

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles, and today I’m joined by J. Craig Williams, author of the book. How would You Decide 10 Famous Trials That Changed History Book One. Craig, thank you so much for joining us.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, thank you, Lee. Appreciate you having me on the show.

Lee Rawles:

And your voice may be familiar to our listeners. Could you talk a little bit about who you are and what other podcasts you’re involved in?

J. Craig Williams:

Well, the other podcast I’m involved in is called Lawyer to Lawyer, also here on the Legal Talk Network. Started in 2005 before it was the Legal Talk Network, back when it was Boston Media Group podcasts had just gotten started, and I think that now we’re probably the oldest one on the internet.

Lee Rawles:

Amazing to still have it going from 2005. So let’s get to how would you decide, how did you come up with, how would you decide what made you want to do this book project?

J. Craig Williams:

Well, it’s actually an offshoot of my first book that was published by Kaplan Publishing originally How to Get Sued, an instructional guide. My editor asked me to write a second book. She gave me the idea to take famous trials and just analyze them from a trial lawyer standpoint because that’s what I’ve done for my 40 years of career in law is try cases. So I took a look. I found transcripts online and was able to read a lot about the trials and then kind of looked at it from why did it happen this way? The book was originally called Bad Decisions, 10 Famous Trials that Changed History. When my wife got ahold of the title or talked to me about it, she’s like, that’s a negative title. Let’s come up with something positive. So she came up with a title.

Lee Rawles:

She came up with the title. And how did you come up with the trials? Because they really span a lot of history. You and I are both Americans and probably most familiar with the US legal system, but you didn’t only select trials from the US legal system. How’d you come up with your list?

J. Craig Williams:

Well, it started out basically as a kind of historical review. I wanted to start with an old case. One of the oldest ones I could find was the trial of Jesus. Not much was written about it, but my dad was a minister. I spent a lot of time as a young kid in church, so I felt a little bit competent to take it on both from a religious standpoint and from a legal standpoint. So that was kind of how the first one got picked, just because I thought I should start with something older. And then as I looked through it, my editor at Kaplan Publishing and I talked about the cases that she thought would be interesting to people. So we kind of developed the list together.

Lee Rawles:

And for the listeners who are wondering, okay, so you’ve picked 10 cases, how exactly are you approaching them as a trial lawyer? When you are describing the cases, you really are looking at them through the lens of a modern lawyer, but you have a lot of sympathy for the mindset that people would have at the time based on what their life experiences were or what the state of law would’ve been to them here, I’m thinking particularly of the Salem Witch Trials chapter. Can you talk a little bit about that process and how you’re not only looking at the law from your vantage point as an expert in that, but also at the historical context?

J. Craig Williams:

Well, that’s a really interesting chapter to me. I was born in Massachusetts not far from Salem, and had a lot of time as a young kid visiting and learning about the situation. And as I went through high school, you learned about the witches being burned in Europe and then being hung here in the United States. So historically, to me, it seemed like a natural Halloween always brings around those thoughts. And so it’s a good time of year to be talking about that having just passed Halloween. But the historical nature of it really intrigued me, and you said that I had some sympathy for the people at the time, and I think that that sympathy really arises from being a trial lawyer. When you go into handle a case, you have to look at it from where it is, the cards are on the table. You can’t put your own kind of sensibilities on it, and you can’t put society’s sensibilities on it. You have to deal with where it is at the time. So the surrounding history of the whole situation, and I think that’s put out or laid out very well in the beginning of the chapter, how religion and fear at the time played such a part in the hysteria that went around for attacking people for things that were otherwise explainable. So the history of it really intrigued me, and I think that that’s, and my experience as a child growing up around Salem really gave me some experience to kind of understand that a little bit better.

Lee Rawles:

One of the things that I really enjoy about how would you decide is sort of the depth of research that you then made available to the reader. First of all, there’s a fabulous index. There are appendices, and you created a website that has even more bonus material. Can you talk about the extras that accompany? How would you decide?

J. Craig Williams:

Well, yeah, almost. And your listeners that are lawyers will appreciate this from the standpoint that almost wrote a law review article about each one of the chapters, because as you mentioned, there are appendices and indices at the end and so forth so that you can kind of track through the book and learn a little bit more about it yourself. I’ve always been a big believer in citations. As a lawyer, that’s one of the things you have to do if you’re going to make a point, you’ve got to prove it. You’ve got to put the citation for it somewhere that says, this is where I got this. And so this is why it’s legitimate, but it’s also the thought process of the reasoning that you have to go through to kind of understand what happened and why it happened. And then I think a lot of people get intrigued by that.

So the bonus materials I put on the website, largely because they didn’t reproduce very well in the book, modern day printing doesn’t deal well with old records. And there’s some records in there from the Boston Massacre for that particular trial, and the copies that you can get are not really great on the internet, but available. So putting all of those on the website really gives people the chance to kind of jump off the book and dive into this a little bit deeper if something really interests them. And I find that, that I’ve gotten a lot of comments from readers who have said that they really appreciate being able to track through this. I had started writing this book in 2008 as time went on all the links at the time, not all of them, but most of the links that at the time that I got ready to publish it, the publisher, Crimson Club Publishing checked my citations on the internet. Almost all the links were broken. So I had to spend a good solid week doing research again to substitute all of those links in. So if you’re interested in it, jump on ’em now because years from now, they might not be there like they haven’t been for when I first started doing the research,

Lee Rawles:

Well, link rot is what I’ve heard it called, and it’s going to be a serious concern for lawyers in general who are relying on internet-based evidence. I think So good thing to call out.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, there’s always the internet archive, and that’s the place where you can go and find just about anything that’s ever been on the internet.

Lee Rawles:

The internet archive, the way back machine, the

J. Craig Williams:

Way runs

Lee Rawles:

Good work. Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I appreciated about the book was we have some popular narratives about some of the cases that you selected, like the Black Sox trial with Shoeless Cho Jackson, like the OK Corral Shootout. We have these myths, we have these legends, the Boston Massacre. When you went back and you looked at the case, what you decided to share and what you were finding was not necessarily the myth that we talk about, but what was actually happening in the Courtroom. And I’m thinking about the Scopes Monkey trial as well. The story as I understood it, is not necessarily how it went down in the Courtroom. What has been the response from readers to finding out some of these real backstories of what was really happening or what the actual legal wrangling was about?

J. Craig Williams:

I think the most surprising one was the Okay Corral Shootout trial. So many of my friends and especially lawyers who you would think would know, didn’t know that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday were tried for murder after the Okay Corral Shootout. Everybody thought, okay, tombstone the movie, it’s over with at the end. They walk away into the sunset and they go on and life ends. But no, that was the biggest surprise for me in the book to learn that there was an actual trial afterward. It was actually a coroner’s inquest where they were put on trial by the members of the Clanton gang that were still alive. The readers that I’ve talked to also have expressed surprise about that. Many of my lawyer friends have gotten the book and read it, and I go to a number of bar functions where people talk to me about it.

And as you said, the Boston Massacre episode was another one that many other my friends have commented to me about saying that they really did not understand that the British were not at fault. And it was started largely by the rabble-rousers. And you’ll know the name because you may drink his beer. Samuel Adams, John Adams’ brother. And the other thing that a lot of people have said is that they were very surprised about learning the depth of dedication that John Adams future president at the time that he did it here in the United States, he undertook the defense of the British soldiers and lost half of his law practice as a consequence. It would be like a modern day lawyer coming out and saying, I support Kamala Harris, or I support Trump because you’re going to lose half your business. And that’s basically what happened to John Adams, and it was this brother that started the whole thing.

Lee Rawles:

And as you mentioned, it was an unpopular case. I would love to hear more from you about John Adams, the man and what you learned about him through researching and writing. How would you decide?

J. Craig Williams:

The first thing to do is to watch the movie because you at least begin to get a flavor of, it’s kind of odd to say it for the costuming, for the kind of clothes that the people were at the time, because I think that that starts to lend itself when you start to do this research, if you kind of put on that costume when you do the research and you put yourself in that mindset to dive into life as it existed at the time, John Adams’ wife, Abigail even objected to him representing the British soldiers and members of her family, and members of his family were very much against it, which I think made it really difficult because when he started that representation, he didn’t know that he was going to lose half his practice as a consequence of it. He still had a full practice behind him and he was ready to go.

But afterward when he lost half of his business and it really hurt his family, he still stood up. And there’s a quote in the book where he says, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country. And he was so right because his representation of the British soldiers and proving that they were innocent, put the United States on the world stage as a country that could be trusted in its judicial system. And that representation turned us from 13 colonies into a country and started us on the path that we are on today as a thanks to this man. So I love doing the research because it taught me more about the foundation of our country than I think I ever understood going through law school. And you get to get a pretty deep understanding of it in law school.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with J. Craig Williams about his book. How would you decide 10 famous trials that changed history book one. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. So Craig, we were just speaking about John Adams and one of the little factoids about his tour de force representation of the British soldiers to me was that he argued for 12 hours over two days, and that is about the same amount of time you say as Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, Johnny Cochrane, and the OJ Dream team combined argued, and that is another case that you look in in 10 famous trials. We’ve talked about trials that happened long before either of us were born. How was it different to go back and look at a more recent trial where the procedures are much more similar to what we would expect to see in court today?

J. Craig Williams:

I observed it in the book. It’s actually frightening when you look back at the procedures that were used in the Salem witch trials. The women and a couple men were not provided lawyers. They were presumed guilty. And that’s another observation that I make in the book just to sidetrack for a moment, because as a trial lawyer, especially as a criminal defense lawyer, early in my career, I think you learn that you really have to prove your innocence. And that I don’t think has changed from the time of the Salem witch trials till now. Yes, yes, we have the thing that says you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. But when you go into the Courtroom and you watch the jury and you to them and you talk to them afterward, they come in saying, well, look, the police arrested you. Here’s all this evidence. The judges bound you over for trial.

So there’s been at least two determinations before us that you’re probably guilty. So jurors, I think, sit on criminal trials saying to themselves, yeah, guy’s, probably guilty, but let’s hear the evidence. Anyway. So I don’t think that that aspect of the law has changed much. There are more protections, obviously now if you can’t afford an attorney, one’s going to be appointed for you as a public defender where that was never provided before, not even a consideration in the early trials. So some of those procedures I think have remained the same. I wonder sometimes whether there are too many procedures and too many protections, and whether we get it wrong because of that. But there’s another podcast here called The Innocence Project and a couple others that actually do that work, and they do absolutely fine work in proving that people are innocent that have been wrongly convicted.

And there’s the old saying that it’s better than nine go free than one, get wrongly convicted. The thing for me about watching the procedures change over time has just been how much more complicated it’s become and how much more lawyers have put layers and layers on the proceedings in order to, sometimes you wonder what it’s really for, whether or not it’s to align the lawyer’s pockets or whether it’s to protect the individual. There has been many a time when I’ve been in court and the lawyer will say a code word to the judge like, I need a continuance, your Honor, because I’m waiting for the witness, Mr. Green. And what they mean is, I haven’t been paid yet, so the money has not flowed. So let’s wait a little bit and see if this guy can pay me before I decide whether I’m going to stay in or go out. I don’t mean to be cynical about it, but I think that there’s some level of cynicism that you have to have in order to take a look at this. As you read through the book.

Lee Rawles:

And the three modern trials are what I would past 1980 that you look at are the Lindy Chamberlain trial, the McMartin Preschool Trial, and the OJ Murder trial. What about those three made them stand out to you as the ones that we should be focusing on? And for people who may not know what the Lindy Chamberlain trial is, Lindy Chamberlain is the woman who lost her young baby in Australia to wildlife dingo.

J. Craig Williams:

Right? The dingo ate my baby case,

A sad, sad case as is the McMartin preschool case. And depending on your opinion, the OJ case, I think that the commonality in all three of those is that there are serious questions whether justice was ever done. The McMartin preschool case is a travesty of justice, $17 million spent and not a single conviction. We ripped up a school, we dug through the ground to find secret tunnels that never existed. We’ve ruined many people’s lives, all because some woman dropped her kid off at a preschool who didn’t want, the kid didn’t agree to take the kid, but mom left the kid there. And so they cared for him. And then that woman who was a little bit psycho herself started the whole process by accusing the preschool of sexual harassment of, or sexual abuse, rather of her son when that was actually happening at home. I mean, even in that case, the most astounding thing to me is that the state put an expert on about child psychology, and the only license that woman held was a welding license.

How embarrassing. I mean, 17 million spent of our taxpayer’s money on that farce. And then you turn to the Australian case for poor Lindy Chamberlain, the woman had a different religion than most of the rest of the country. She didn’t respond the way that we expect mothers to respond when they lose a child. She was stoic instead of crying and not playing to the television like we expect. And you begin to wonder as a consequence, how much media has had an effect on people that come to those kind of conclusions? Are we just a nation of soundbites? And that’s all we’re willing to deal with? We don’t dive into it deep enough to understand it. Well, this poor woman was convicted, and honestly, if you read through the chapter, I think you would agree that she was railroaded into it. And then years later, the daughter Azaria’s little matinee jacket was found in the wild next to Uluru, which people call heirs rock in Australia, and there was dingle saliva on the baby’s jacket and blood.

So Lindy Chamberlain got released, but how do you get your life back after that? And the situation, we see it all the time in the news where people are released after they’ve been in jail for such a long period of time, and we give them a million or two as some kind of compensation, sometimes not even that, but you’ve taken away 30, 40 years of this person’s life, and then you turn to the OJ trial. We all watched it on television, at least those of us who were alive at the time, from the time that the white Broncos slowly went down the freeway to the time that they celebrated at the end for his acquittal, then many people were pleased and happy at the very end when he was convicted in Vegas for stealing his memorabilia back thinking that justice has finally found its home. Those three trials for me really stood out because of I think the travesty of justice that was done in all three.

Lee Rawles:

Now, your wife counseled you to rename your book to make it not so negative, and as I look at the 10 chapters that you’re looking at, were there any of those that you came away thinking, you know what, this actually marked a positive thing for the rule of law for the legal system. Obviously, a lot of these exposed the deficits in what justice was or was not available to the people at the time. Were there any of these chapters that you were like, you know what, this actually, this sparks some progress in some way?

J. Craig Williams:

I think perhaps the one I would pin it on would be the trial of John Brown. That was a spark for a significant number of things in the man turned out to be a martyr, perhaps misguided. But yet, his speech in court was probably one of the most profound speeches that has ever been given by an order. And we have some good ones here. We have William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow in the Scopes trial that just give amazing performances that frankly gave me goosebumps as I read them because they were so powerful. But you have to think that John Brown was a tipping point, and then you have the Dred Scott decision and you have Plessy versus Ferguson that come and flow from that. So I think he was a very central figure in the country that other than the Kansas album really doesn’t get a lot of play. He doesn’t get much attention in history. He doesn’t get much attention in the Civil War. But as a true historian, you’d have to go back and look at him as a very pivotal point in our history.

Lee Rawles:

We’re going to take another break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Craig about his book. How would you decide 10 famous trials that changed history book one. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m here with J. Craig Williams, author of the book. How would You Decide 10 Famous Trials that Changed History Book One, and don’t think that I missed that. This is book one. So Craig, you mentioned that you’ve been working on this book since 2008, but Book one really hints to me that there may be a book too. And I’m wondering if you can share with us any ideas you have for the next set of trials you’re interested in looking into.

J. Craig Williams:

Yeah, book one. Now, that frightened me. When I saw it, my publisher didn’t tell me that she was going to put it on the book, and so I said, well, you can’t put this on the thing. I don’t have SQL Ready. And she said, well, you’re going to, so one of the ones that really intrigues is the Rosenberg trial. Ooh,

Lee Rawles:

I didn’t think about that one.

J. Craig Williams:

Yeah, I’ve had a number of other suggestions, and my plan is that this next year, I’ll be writing about a chapter every several months, three or four months, hopefully compiling them into a second sequel once I get another number of them under my belt. But I really haven’t given the whole sequel thing much thought beyond the Rosenberg trial. My friends have given me some suggestions, some other famous trials. There’s a lot of them out there, obviously right now. I dunno if you caught it in the news recently, but the Menendez brothers have gotten themselves up for being released. They had a chance with the former Los Angeles District Attorney Gascon, but now we have a new district attorney, and it doesn’t look like the boys are going to get out. So perhaps the Menendez trial, the double murder, Lizzie Borden is another one. Sensational trials really kind of lend themselves to it because people always wonder about what the motivation was and could it happen to me, I think, which is ultimately the real question that people ask when they read about murders.

Lee Rawles:

Well, if you’re looking for another further back in history trial, I recently watched a silent film about the trial of Joan of Ark that was based on the transcripts from her interviews with the church officials. And I was like, what? That still exists. I mean, when I read the Black Sox chapter in your book, the trial transcripts from that trial seemed to be missing and gone, but Joan of Arks are there. So just throwing my hat in the rink. I would love to read your take on that case.

J. Craig Williams:

That would be an interesting one, especially because it’s been covered so much and there’ve been so many movies about it. The dangerous thing for me is that as a trial lawyer, I don’t know much about Napoleonic Law, frankly. I don’t know much about Australian law either. But thankfully, I have a very dear friend who I took theBar with a number of years ago who helped walk me through some of the Australian procedure issues to make sure that I was quoting things correctly and understanding them. So I’d be a bit afraid to take on Jonah Mark without some kind of co-writer or somebody that had helped coach me through some of the nuances of the Napoleonic Law. Because when you deal with these things, it’s sometimes a little trick that gets you out of it. And that’s if you take the Okay Corral trial, that was just a little trick that got those boys off the hook.

Let me give one more thought about another famous trial that I’ve been thinking about doing, and that’s the Nurenberg trials. I don’t know if you caught it, but just recently, in fact, I think it was this morning that the World Court has issued charges against Benjamin Netanyahu and a Hamas leader. So we continue to have these international issues, and the Nuremberg Trials was something that happened for four years after World Wari and wow, that’s an awful lot to go through. But I think it would be very interesting to kind of sort through that, especially with what Half the country is believing is coming in this next administration.

Lee Rawles:

Well, you and I spoke earlier about the multimedia aspects of how would you decide, and we mentioned the website, which if listeners want to go to, that’s 10 famous trials.com, the numeral one zero famous trials.com. But there’s also a podcast miniseries that you did called In Dispute. It’s still ongoing. They you’re still releasing episodes. I’ve listened to three of them so far. Could you talk a little bit about this companion podcast miniseries?

J. Craig Williams:

Sure. As you mentioned in the very beginning, I do the Lawyer to Lawyer podcast, and as you do those podcasts, you get familiar with your producers and the people that put it on at the Legal Talk Network, and they came up with the idea of creating a podcast miniseries out of the 10 chapters of the book. I immediately love the idea because certainly as you put out a book and then to have a podcast miniseries follow it, how fantastic. So what we’ve been doing is finding lawyers, judges, and witnesses to read the parts of the transcripts that are actual, the trial transcripts that are out of the book and out of the trial transcripts from the actual trials. And I do the narration of it. They do some sound editing to put in some sound effects and some music, kind of like the old Time Radio of the twenties and thirties.

My parents were around then, and they tell me that they used to listen to the radio shows like The Shadow and so forth that sit by the radio and imagine it. So it’s been a real pleasure to go through it. Many of my friends have played the parts of lawyers. Many of the judges I know have stepped in and become the judges who’ve read the parts. But the whole process is we got permission from the publisher to adapt it down to half an hour, 45 minutes worth of a little episode. Then various people read and record the parts from the adaptation, sound edited, put together into an episode. And actually, I think they’re fantastic. I’ve listened to them all myself. We’ve had some listening parties here at my home for some of my friends who’ve participated in it. And Legal Talk Network has done a fantastic job of advertising it.

They’ve put out a slew of little episode clips because each person that has read a part gets a little clip that they can put out on their social media. So then that spreads the news about the episodes and it’s reads the news about the book, and then people actually get into it. I mean, my favorite episode so far is the beginning of the baseball episode where the old time radio comes in and actually recreates the baseball scene that occurred at the time. To me, it’s an interesting chapter because as you said, there were no transcripts, and so you had to draw from the newspapers at the time. So then the multimedia aspect of the book comes into play because I can take those parts of the clippings from the newspapers and some of the little sound edits and put them out there, so that now this book has turned itself into not only the extras on the website, which works for either 10 TEN or number 10 famous trials.com, and putting those bonus materials on there because I discovered so much interesting stuff that are just the backdrops. I don’t know about you, but when I get into something, I really want to find out more about it and dive into it as deep as I can in this.

Lee Rawles:

Oh, I love a deep dive, love becoming obsessive about one singular historical event. Absolutely. Well, we had you on to talk about how would you decide 10 famous trials that changed history, but Christmas and the holiday seasons are coming, and I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up that you and your wife actually have also written a Christmas story, a children’s book. Can you talk a little bit about the sled?

J. Craig Williams:

Yeah. One of my favorite projects, that was my second book after How to Get Sued. I have four grandchildren, two of them are 10 and two of them are seven. My daughter grew up on a farm. My granddaughter is growing up on a farm, and to me, I really wanted her to be able to have something to remember her grandfather by, because she lives quite a distance from me, and we don’t get a ton of time together a couple times a year. So as a gift to her, I thought I would write a Christmas story about her saving Christmas. The book has a number of very personal things to me in it. Family members are the names of the characters in the book. My other grandson is a character in the book as well, Naomi Jo and Kingston. Those are my grandchildren. There is an animal character in the book, A Bighorn, and for 40 years now, 30 some years, I served as the General counsel for the Bighorn Institute, which is the only recovery center in the United States that is working to save bighorn sheep in the wild, a very charismatic animal out here in Palm Desert and Palm Springs area.

And it’s been an absolute pleasure to be on that board and work with it to save those sheep and repopulate the wild with them. So that character is in the book. And then my wife, when she was much younger, built from the ground up a private zoo with some of her friends, and it’s now become, it’s called Zoo to you. And if you see hands on a television show handing an animal to someone, it’s probably their animal and probably their hands handing the animal on stage. So there are some animals that they appear in the book as well. So it’s just kind of a whole story about how Christmas gets lost through anger and resentment among family members, and then how Christmas can be saved. And my granddaughter, Naomi, saves Christmas. I’m not going to tell you how, but it’s a very interesting story and one that,

Lee Rawles:

Well, there’s a lovely message about blended families as well.

J. Craig Williams:

Yes. Yeah, my daughter comes from a blended family. I married her mother after her father died and adopted her. So that’s all part of it. And yeah, there are many hidden messages in it that if you can dive into it and get to know me a little bit better, you’d find out about it. But it’s a gift to my grandchildren. And there’s a second book that I’m working on for this second set of grandchildren, the seven year olds, two boys, and I’m debating on the name of the book, but I was born near a lake in Massachusetts called Lake Chaba Wog.

Lee Rawles:

Oh my goodness. One more time. Say it one

J. Craig Williams:

More time. I’m not going to try that one more time. Maybe the sound editor could put it in a second time, but it means in Indian language, you fish on your side of the lake, all fish on my side of the lake, and nobody fishes in the middle. And it’s another great message. And so I think these boys are going to take off on an adventure that starts out them thinking that they’re on the one side of the ocean and the other one’s on the other side of the ocean. They’re actually just on two sides of the lake.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Craig, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library, the Sled. And how would you decide 10 famous trials that changed history are both available on Amazon, but if people were interested in learning more about your projects, more about things that you have coming up or lawyer to lawyer, where could they go or how could they reach out to you?

J. Craig Williams:

Well, you can find me on the [email protected] is just J-C-R-A-I-G williams.com. My law firm’s name is Williams Law Corporation, and that’s at wlc legal.com. My email phone number are both on there. I don’t really list many current projects that I’m working on. And so you’re the first to find out about this new book.

Lee Rawles:

Well, I cannot wait to pick that up. Maybe Christmas of 2025. Thank you, Craig, for joining us. Thank you to you, my listeners, for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe in your favorite podcast listening service. And if you have a book you’d like me to feature on an upcoming episode, you can always reach out to us at books at ABA Journal dot com.